Thursday, January 28, 2010

Huge news of the death of iconic author and recluse J.D. Salinger swept across the media today, with innumerable news outlets clamoring to publish their obits ASAP after the news broke. In doing so, The New York Times made an embarrassing blunder in what was an otherwise gripping and exhaustive summation of the 91-year-old Salinger's life and times: Editors failed to remove a TK placeholder prior to publishing the obituary on its Web site.

As you can see highlighted in the screen shot above, taken from the article's second page, editors left a TK (a common abbreviation used in publishing to indicate that there is more material "to come") after the quote from Salinger's agent, for which it was apparently holding a place. As you can see below in a screen shot of the exact same graph, Times editors quickly realized the presence of the composition vestige and deleted it from the article--but not before the Proofreader saw it!